Where Does Hillary Clinton Stand on Education Reform?

Hillary Clinton expressed support for education reform in the eighties and nineties but appears to have backed away from some of those positions.

Photograph by T. J. Kirkpatrick / Bloomberg via Getty

One of the most intriguing moments in Sunday night’s Democratic debate came when CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Hillary Clinton, “Do you think unions protect bad teachers?” In the Democratic Party, few subjects are as incendiary as education. On one side of the issue are the reformers, such as Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, who support charter schools, regular testing, and changing labor contracts to make it easier to fire underperforming teachers. On the other side are the defenders of public schools, such as Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, who are seeking to impose limits on the charter movement, modify testing requirements, and stand up for teachers.

In Arkansas in the nineteen-eighties, Hillary Clinton backed education reform, particularly the use of testing to improve standards. In 1992, when her husband was running for President, she received the now-famous “Letter to Hillary Clinton,” from Marc Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, which advocated a national curriculum, extensive testing, and an education system in which “most of the federal, state, district and union rules and regulations” that prevented big changes “are swept away.”

Bill Clinton’s Administration supported legislation that incorporated some of Tucker’s ideas, and it also encouraged the growth of charter schools, which were then a new idea. In her 1996 book, “It Takes a Village,” Clinton wrote, “I favor promoting choice among public schools, much as the President’s Charter Schools Initiative encourages.” In 1998, she said, “The President believes, as I do, that charter schools are a way of bringing teachers and parents and communities together.”

Back then, Hillary Clinton also supported changing rules in order to make it easier for principals and school districts to get rid of problem teachers. In her 2000 Senate run, during a debate with her Republican opponent, Rick Lazio, she said, “I think we ought to streamline the due-process standards so that teachers that don’t measure up would no longer be in the classroom.”

Some of Clinton’s wealthy backers are still big supporters of the education-reform agenda, which the Obama Administration has also pursued aggressively. (Last year, it asked Congress for a fifty-per-cent increase in funding for charters.) But as Cooper pointed out during Sunday night’s debate, Clinton has received the endorsement of two of the biggest teachers’ unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, which are far less enthusiastic about charters and changes to work rules. Does this mean Clinton has modified her views on schools?

Listening to her answer Cooper’s question about whether unions protect bad teachers, it was hard to tell. “It really pains me,” she said, to see teachers scapegoated when governments have failed to support their work. “So just to follow up,” Cooper said, “you don’t believe unions protect bad teachers?” Clinton replied, “You know what—I have told my friends at the top of both unions, we’ve got take a look at this because it is one of the most common criticisms. We need to eliminate the criticism. You know, teachers do so much good. They are often working under [the] most difficult circumstances. So anything that could be changed, I want them to look at it. I will be a good partner to make sure that whatever I can do as President, I will do to support the teachers of our country.”

Based on this response, it appears that Clinton does still want to tackle the issue of teacher tenure, but she also wants to support teachers, many of whom are vehemently opposed to seeing their contracts altered. It would have been illuminating if Cooper had pursued this line of questioning and asked Clinton whether she still supports continuing to expand the number of charter schools. Last November, at a town-hall meeting in South Carolina, shortly after she picked up the support of the teachers’ unions, she voiced a line commonly associated with critics of charters. After acknowledging that for thirty years she had “supported the idea of charter schools,” she said, “Most charter schools—I don’t want to say every one—but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids. Or, if they do, they don’t keep them. And so the public schools are often in a no-win situation, because they do, thankfully, take everybody, and then they don’t get the resources or the help and support that they need to be able to take care of every child’s education.”

Coming from someone they had long regarded as a political ally, these comments enraged many people in the charter movement. “That is absolutely false,” Jeanne Allen, the founder of the Center for Education Reform, told the Washington Post. “She sounds like an aloof, élite candidate from a bygone era, before ed reform was a reality.”

Since her exchange in South Carolina, Clinton hasn’t said much about charters and school reform. On her campaign Web site, she pledges to “make high-quality education available to every child—in every ZIP code—in America,” but I couldn’t find any mention of charter schools or changing teachers’ contracts. And Sanders, who earlier this year said that he was opposed to “privately run charter schools,” hasn’t made much of these issues, either. Granted the opportunity by Cooper to chime in on the question about teachers, he changed the subject to his plan to abolish tuition fees at public universities.

That was unfortunate. School reform is one of the great issues of the past few decades, and during the eighties and nineties supporting it was one of the key things that distinguished “New Democrats” like the Clintons from traditional Democrats. In recent years, as the number of charter schools has grown enormously, the debate about their impact has only intensified. Some studies have cast doubt on whether they produce lasting gains compared to traditional public schools, although supporters of charters continue to insist that the evidence shows otherwise.

Given Clinton’s long history of involvement in education policy, if she is having second thoughts, she ought to explain them in more detail. Does her alliance with the teachers' unions and her critical comment about charters reflect an acknowledgement that the school-reform movement has failed to live up to some of its promises and needs to be reconsidered? Or is she merely playing primary politics?